Five Minutes With Eric Schlosser

Is obesity the next big American political issue? With one Republican presidential hopeful, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, gaining national recognition for his personal weight loss and collaboration with former President Clinton to keep sweets out of school, it's possible. One person responsible for raising public awareness of the issue is Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist and modern-day Upton Sinclair who penned Fast Food Nation in 2001, a blistering expose of the dark side of the fast food industry: health risks, horrific working conditions and industry efforts to market directly to children.

Now, Schlosser is back with a fast food follow-up, Chew on This, a similar expose written with Charles Wilson; it focuses particularly on the dangers of fast food for children. But Schlosser is now set to reach an even larger audience: In the coming months we'll see a film based on Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater and featuring big name stars like Patricia Arquette, released across the country. Since we couldn't convince him to sit down with us over a burger, Campus Progress chatted with Schlosser over the phone.

Campus Progress: Fast Food Nation was a dramatic wake-up call for a lot of young people about foods we had all grown up eating. What inspired you to write that book?

Eric Schlosser: Well, I didn't come to it out of any great hatred for fast food, I used to eat it all the time. I did a big investigative piece at The Atlantic Monthly. It was about illegal immigration, it was about farm labor, migrant farm workers, and I told a very complicated story through something simple and concrete: a strawberry. We love strawberries and we eat lots of strawberries, and we eat lots of strawberries without ever thinking that each one of those strawberries has to be picked by hand. So, you want a lot of strawberries, you need a lot of hands. And that article was read at Rolling Stone magazine, and they invited me in to do the same thing for fast food.

Basically, they wanted me to go behind the counter and show all the complex systems that bring you this heavily processed food. I didn't jump at the opportunity because I eat fast food, and I didn't want to write something condescending and elitist putting down the industry, but the more I learned, the more amazed I was, and what was incredible to me was that I would be eating this food all the time without thinking about it, without having any idea where it came from or how it was being made.

Campus Progress: As a writer, I have to tell you the lead to that book is just incredible. You start out in a military base ...

ES: ... Cheyenne Mountain. One of our most top secret military bases, which is inside a hollowed-out mountain in Colorado.

Campus Progress: How do you come up with something like that?

ES: You know, it's not always premeditated. A lot of it comes out of the reporting. I was looking for a place to set Fast Food Nation, and Colorado sounded really interesting to me. It felt like, with the whole conservative religious fundamentalist culture, it was at the cutting edge of change in America. Little did I know how much that culture would take over America.

I decided to set it in Colorado Springs. There are these big military bases, so I applied to visit the base. And while I was there I started talking to them about what they eat there and it just blew my mind that, at that point, and I'm sure its no longer true post 9/11, the Domino's Pizza delivery guy would come right up to the gate at one of the most top-secret, important military installations in the United States. [If] you can get Domino's delivered to the Cheyenne Mountain air station, fast food has really infiltrated every part of American life.

Campus Progress: Tell us a little bit about your new film based on Fast Food Nation and whether you and Morgan Spurlock have a rivalry.